1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to the field of network-connected personal computers and, in particular, to control and reconfiguration of individual client systems over a network.
2. Background
With personal computers (PCS) being increasingly connected into networks to allow transfers of data among computers to occur, more operations such as maintenance and updating of applications and data collections are occurring over the network. As computers are also becoming essential to their users to perform their work it is desirable to shift the time when maintenance and updates occur to not interfere with productive work. It is also desired to perform maintenance remotely without a service call to drive up cost.
One solution to this problem has been wake up technology, such as IBM's Wake on LAN technology, which supports special signaling over a network to cause a client to power itself up. The network manager may then perform various operations on the client. This allows some degree of remote maintenance but there is a major class of system work that is hardware related and requires on-site service to perform the modification needed. Also, there is a major class of problems that prevent the operating system from loading so maintenance applications are not able to run even with the system powered up.